Persistent deforestation of the Amazon to grow soybean stems from the fact that some buyers, mainly Chinese, have not signed the moratorium.

Still, Brazil has imposed tough penalties on companies that produce soybeans on illegally cleared land or buy from it.

"This agreement shows that consumers no longer tolerate deforestation of the Amazon, but it does not control the indirect impact of soybeans on the jungle," said Marcio Astrini, coordinator of Greenpeace Brazil's Amazon protection campaign.

He said growing is often done in places that had been used for cattle raising, which just goes elsewhere and ranchers burn down more trees.

Geographer Mariana Soares Domingues of the University of Sao Paulo, studies the process in the arboricultural state of Mato Grosso.

"Cattle ranchers burn down fresh jungle, plant grass from airplanes and then bring in cattle," she said.

"After a few years these pastures have been worn out, the cattle raising operations move on to deforest some place else and soybean growing takes over on these abandoned plots of land," she added.

"The soybean industry has an indirect responsibility," said Pires, of Abiove. "It buys land that has already been cleared, which is easier to plant, and the cattle raising moves to areas that are less expensive, in other words, the jungle. Thus are the dynamics of agriculture in these regions," he said.

Combine harvesters crop soybeans during a demonstration for the press, in Campo Novo do Parecis, Brazil, on March 27, 2012.

"Direct pressure on the Amazon is easing but the expansion is coming at the expense of ecosystems like the Cerrado," said Becker of WWF, referring to a sprawling woodland savanna ecosystem in central Brazil.

The Cerrado accounted for more than 60 percent of the record soybean harvest posted in 2012-13. Brasil is now close to overtaking the United States as the world's top soybean producer this year.

Deforesting the Cerrado, and thus drying it out, would be hugely detrimental because it feeds huge rivers basins like Amazon and the Paraná", said the geographer, Soares Domingues.

New forestry laws passed last year implicitly encourage the exploitation of the Cerrado: farmers can now grow on 65 percent of their land, compared to 50 percent before.

"Soybeans have a major impact on the Cerrado but our European customers worry about the Amazon and the native peoples. The market is not yet asking us to protect this ecosystem," said Pires, referring to the Cerrado.

Ecologists say Brazil, the world's fifth largest farmer producer, can increase production without felling a single tree.

"The country has 60 million hectares of former pasture or abandoned land. They could be turned into productive land and thus double the amount of farm land," said Astrini, of Greenpeace.

The soybean industry accounts for nearly 2 percent of Brazil's GDP and wields more and more influence on economic and political decision making.

Related Stories

The stability of the Amazon rainforest, and the ecosystem's resilience to widespread deforestation, may be much lower than previously thought. The replacement of stands of trees with grassland changes evapotranspiration rates ...

A Kansas State University geographer is part of a research team out to prove what environmental scientists have suspected for years: Increasing the production of soybean and biofuel crops in Brazil increases deforestation ...

An Iowa State University grain markets expert said this week that a combination of long-term trends and recent weather patterns are responsible for putting Brazil in a position this year to overtake U.S. soybean production ...

Yosemite National Park is bracing for its driest year on record, with visitor bureaus downplaying the allure of the park's most famous waterfall and instead touting the park as a destination for hiking, bicycling and photography.

A new stream-based monitoring system recently discovered high levels of methane in a Pennsylvania stream near the site of a reported Marcellus shale gas well leak, according to researchers at Penn State and the U.S. Geological ...

A team led by Washington State University researchers has found that methane emissions from local natural gas distribution systems in cities and towns throughout the U.S. have decreased in the past 20 years ...

In the first-of-its-kind study of the environmental effects of hydropeaking, that is releasing water at hydropower dams to meet peak daily electricity demand, two University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers ...